Behind closed doors with the maestro

20 August 2008

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As a Proms presenter, Clemency Burton-Hill had unique access to Daniel Barenboim last week: she reports on his private remarks about music and his rage for excellence

Later, charging off stage to thunderous applause, Barenboim’s eyes are twinkling; his face is aglow. ‘We are a family,’ he reminds me. His son, Michael, currently leads the orchestra, but I wonder if he perhaps thinks of them all as his children? ‘In a way, yes...’ he agrees. ‘I have learned a tremendous amount from them. When you hear what they have to say, the freshness of their minds, how they think, being every day faced with the situations they are faced with.... They have a fantastic generosity of music-making. So I learned a lot. It is a project that has literally changed the life of everyone who has come into contact with it, including my own.’

And including everyone lucky enough to see them live. At the end of the concert, the roars are deafening; the cheers go on and on, the stamps of 1,500 Prommers and 5,000 seated ticket-holders demanding the inevitable encore — which Barenboim duly provides, preceded by a few words. ‘In the past, I’ve been made to [talk] about what is wrong within the Middle East,’ he jokes. ‘I’m not going to do that tonight because you’ve just heard what is right in the Middle East.’ More cheers. The orchestra play Wagner as a coda because, as Barenboim explains, ‘I always like to put in programmes where there is a major work by Schoenberg, one by Brahms and one by Wagner, because I’m fascinated how he managed to make a synthesis of two people who couldn’t stand each other....’

Before his death, Edward Said called Daniel Barenboim’s activity with the West-Eastern Divan ‘a gesture of the highest form of human solidarity’. In a region where human solidarity is in tragically short supply, whatever their limitations, such gestures count for much.

Everything Is Connected: The Power of Music by Daniel Barenboim is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson at £16.99. For information about the orchestra visit http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de